Old Masters

My master, he died

not too recently

but late enough

that I might still be

justified to render

him memorial. Only

a bastard wants

to call those

in whose care

he was embedded

what he himself

can't stand

having been —

that a lord could be

magnanimous

is an unbearable

fact of life, but so

my lord was. His every

word was lightness

self-adequate, could never

have been other than

what it was encountered

as — total and level

as the horizon, steadfast

as bread, his every

work anticipating even

the freest, cunning or happy

thing I might've wanted

to shave into form

if I had not then realized

for shame, I know this

passage — it is my master's.

The knowledge that

he never intended

his works to eclipse

those of his charges

haunts, smothers me still

with the shame I feel

in the face of my

resentment. To have toiled

in his stables, my hand

reduced to the wake

of his own. No signature

but fidelity as I attest

I never knew, or can still

only guess the motion

of his mind no better than

the most mercenary

lover of his works.

How others later

might even come

to debate whether

I actually existed

and I myself question

if it's worth putting

into words what

I've learned, for example

of the cities where

I lived after

being released

from his presence —

how after examining

old engravings

I noticed the curve

of a stream became

a fetid moat running

the foot of a rampart

and then a street

with a subway

following the same

exact curve

dug into the bed

where the water was

once dredged, set

further underground

after the bombing of the city

gave occasion to revise

itself, where I arrive

to go up and sit

in a bar to figure out

how I got here — the fact

that only I remember

does not compare

with the purity

of my master's having been

in all these places

when everything was

wholly as it was

before me, and so

I let it go, I defer

to his mastery.